Whilst the Stabiliser was build horizontal, using the rib building tabs to keep everything flat until the top skin has been added, the elevators & rudder are built vertical on their respective ply strips.
The elevator strips are 0.8mm ply, so these need to be held flat on the building board whilst the ribs are added (until the 1/2” x 1/8” spars are fitted). The TE is shown as a 4mm Balsa core (notched for each rib TE), sanded to profile & then capped with 0.4mm ply skins to give a 2mm thick TE.
After trying this approach on the LH elevator, I decided to try a slightly different approach on the RH one in order to give a better defined TE when profiling.
Thus although most of the RH elevator TE is comprised of a separate trim tab, the tip section TE core will be made from a strip of 0.8mm ply laminated between two 1/16” Balsa strips.
When profiled, the Balsa will be sanded back to the ply edge. The 0.8mm ply core, plus two 0.4mm caps should give a solid & straight 1.6mm thick TE.
It’s also worth noting that, in common with other CNC cut builds, the CNC parts are often a slightly different size from the printed plan - due to paper print linear errors being greater than the very much more accurate laser cutting.
This difference is more obvious on span-wise parts.
However, the answer is to use the laser cut parts as the reference, using the plan as a guide to enable some hand cut parts to be correctly resized, rather than cut from the plan.
If everything is cut from the printed plan, then there shouldn’t be an issue as everything will be out by the same percentage error.
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